This session will highlight the expanding role of Ecological Research and Monitoring Networks (ERMNs) in ecology. ERMNs are sets of sites where the same population and/or ecosystem measurements are made by multiple users in a coordinated fashion. ERMNs’ data gathering ranges from one-time measurements to decades of annual monitoring, and from tens of kilometers to global in scale. ERMNs can be institutionalized or ad hoc, can move biological material as well as data, and can include tens of thousands of individuals. The use of ERMNs has been growing rapidly in many disciplines, and multiple continental-scale ERMNs with broad mandates are currently under development. One theme of the session is to learn more about how ERMNs are constructed and function, while delineating their benefits to ecological understanding. We have assembled a group of speakers that run population ERMNs as well as ecosystem ERMNs, spanning well-funded successes as well as those that are run on shoestrings, and lastly those that not only monitor but also perform replicated, coordinated experiments. Each presenter will be asked to provide background on their ERMN and describe how it runs. For example, how is methodology standardized, how is research coordinated among members, and how are they funded? The majority of each talk will be on key results and insights that have been learned from the network. Lastly, we’ll ask each speaker to contextualize their network with other, similar networks and to conclude with a vision of the future for their network. We hope that by profiling a diversity of ERMNs, we can urge government agencies and other funding institutions to make greater commitments to increasing the amount and long-term stability of funding for ERMNs. We will end our session with a synthesis talk that lays out a vision for how to progress with ERMNs coupled with a panel discussion on some of the major outstanding issues.